Linked by David Adams on Wed 30th Mar 2011 15:38 UTC, submitted by John

Techcrunch is reporting from the usual "reliable sources" that one reason why there was no discussion of iOS 5 at the iPad 2 unveiling was that iOS 5 is going to be delayed until the fall, even though previous iOS updates have been done in the spring, making it a tradition of sorts. Furthermore, the upcoming WWDC will be "software only" and will not include the unveiling of any new hardware, in particular the iPhone 5, which will presumably be released concurrently with the iOS update.

Apple is no longer setting the pace of the smart phone market any more. It's pretty clear Android is leading that segment of the phone market and Apple is playing catch up at this point.

Tethering and wifi hotspot features were first to come on Android more than a year ago. It's being rolled out on iOS just recently but only for GSM iPhones. Android's OS wide voice input was introduced with Froyo (2.2) and there is nothing comparable on iOS. Apple bought Siri almost a year ago and yet there is no sign of OS level integration of speech input capability. Many new Android phones are using dual core arm processors but we probably won't see this for another three to four months on the iPhone. 3D image and video capture came first on the Android yet it's not something we'll see on iOS anytime soon. Android will soon make a big push into NFC (Near Field Communication) this year. It's not clear if Apple is going to have this capability on the iPhone 5. 4G Android phones will soon be coming out in droves while it's doubtful that iPhone 5 will do 4G.

Cloud music streaming introduced by Amazon is only on Android at the moment partly because of Apple's app store policy. Google is definitely working on their own cloud based music streaming service and I doubt Apple will allow that on the iOS so therefore it will be Android only as well. Apple bought Lala on December of 2009 and it fell into a black hole and disappeared. On a side note Apple also bought a mapping company but that also fell into the same black hole.

It looks like Apple is trying to compete against the world but clearly it's not able to keep up with Android and dozens of large companies building their business on it. The gap between Android and iOS is growing by the day and I just don't see Apple catching up.

Watch out though, apparently saying this out loud constitutes as trolling.

It isn't trolling, it's mostly either factually incorrect or irrelevant. Seriously, the same group of people who poo-poo'd the iPod and claim that the iPad is a fad will continue to complain about how the iPhone doesn't come with 4G, 256TB of storage, a swiss army knife, this, that or the other thing. And Apple will continue to be the largest mobile device provider in the world, owning over 50% of the profits in that space. (Now someone is going to talk about sheep and cults and act like 10's of millions of people simply are unable to control themselves and buy Apple's products due to mind control or some other equally stupid thing).

On the flip side, it is a really good thing that there is strong competition in the phone space. I enjoy the rate of change going on there. I wish that there was a competent competitor to Apple in the tablet space, instead we have the clown car of desperation and failure.

Has anyone accused you of trolling? Disagreeing with you is not the same thing, so that comments looks a little petulant.

You're both cherry-picking features that have only arrived in the last few months. Dual-core CPUs on phones are so new that even the Nexus-S is only single-core, and my work one is barely out of the box.

Amazon's service is, what, days old and it's already an example of iOS failure, despite hundreds of thousands of iOS apps or services, some of which presumably don't exist for Android.

If Apple, as rumoured, release the iPhone 5 with an edge-to-edge Retina display, will Android devices have even managed something like the screen in last year's iPhone? Some prefer a bigger device with a bigger screen but the Retina Display, for me, is a huge plus for the iPhone.

It seems like you're only counting the successes on the Android side, but counting iOS's failures before they've even happened.